Heta gets back into the swing

Lara Heta had given up playing squash. After several years slogging her way up the order on the WISPA (women's international) squash tour, she suddenly found herself in a hole.
The break paid dividends, though, because she has come back all guns blazing, primed now for a bid to pick up a medal at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games.
Heta, with her doubles partner Louise Crome, is rated a definite medal prospect and she believes she is in this position only because of her voluntary hiatus from the sport.
"I think I had a hankering for being a normal adult," explains Heta, who comes from Kaitaia.
"I was in a bad place and needed to become a normal person and at the time my squash wasn't going to well either. Having been an athlete all my life, I really had no social life. I had been with my (now) husband 11 years and never had the time to get married."
One of the first things she did after deciding to stop playing competitively was to get married, to Hayden, her longtime partner.
The next was to discover the social scene that had been overlooked in favour of competing on the international squash circuit. It sounds like she enjoyed the change but she was always going to return to the game that had so dominated her life.
"I just started to play squash for fun last year and suddenly discovered I was playing better squash than I had for a long time," she said. "I got better and better and started beating some of the girls that were still on the tour."
Then Heta discovered doubles, and there was no looking back.
It didn't take long for Heta to force her way back into national contention. She even had her eyes on the national singles title at one stage this year, before injury forced her off the court again.
But her new enthusiasm for the game remained, a legacy, she thinks from her upbringing in the sport in Kaitaia where Heta, then known as Lara Petera, was a club mate of fellow Kiwi squash star Shelley Kitchen.
Kitchen and Petera, and a girl called Hayley King, were products of the club and a proud community that still hails them as hometown heroes. The trio represented New Zealand at the world junior tournament in Hong Kong and, during their teenage years, ran rampant through the national circuit.
At the time Susan Devoy was world champion, Ross Norman was still enjoying the spotlight as one of the leading men on the international scene and squash was a popular sport.
For Heta, those heady days bring back mixed memories.
"The best days of my squash were those days in the (NZ) juniors. We were coached by Louise Rogers who was a former New Zealand representative herself and we just threw ourselves right into it.
"We used to get up at stupid o'clock in the morning, head off to the Kaitaia squash courts and train before school then come back again after school as well. I don't actually know how we did it.
"We played tournaments all over the place, we were on a mission and we loved it."
Heta thinks it may be difficult to rekindle her teen zest but, even so, she has been surprised by her enthusiasm for the impending tournament in Melbourne.
A runner-up at a recent world championship doubles helped, and the excitement of representing the country as part of a team rather than as an individual at some nondescript tournament on the other side of the planet also appeals.
"To be totally honest we are going there expecting to get a medal. The luck of the draw might mean we end up playing Shelley and Tasmyn Leevey in the semifinals, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it."